Class Visual Culture

Since the 1980s, the notion of visual culture has been imposed. Superficially, visual culture would be concerned with the objects-products of optical machines, such as photography, video, television, film, graphic and digital images, etc. But this mere enumeration reveals that visual culture is first and foremost a new problem. In fact, following the convergence operated by digital, the way we perceived and analyzed images, separately or in genres, such as photography or cinema, video, etc., changed. It is a process that articulates machines, devices, images and bodies in complex apparatuses that are an essential part of the constitution of experience.

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1. Introduction: What is visual culture? 1.1. Visual culture as a problem 1.2. The visual culture in debate 2. Image as a problem  2.1. Images and original division of the 'real' 2.2. Walter Benjamin and the technical take off of the images 2.3. Aby Warburg And The Pathos Images 2.4 The Guy Debord Show Society 3. The Age of the Image 3.1. Iconology Crisis 3.2. The epoch of the symbolic and space organization 3.3. The grotesque becoming of images 4. Decentralization and fragmentation of the world image in modernity 4.1. Modern optical regimes (Crary) 4.2. Real perception change and vision control 4.3. From phantasmagoria to virtual reality 5. About contemporary images 5.1. Image and Cinematism 5.2. Image Telematics   

This course has been making extensive use of Moodle's capabilities for several years, including: individual assessment in a digital environment, the use of occasional quizzes. Collective practical exercises are conducted to reinforce learning. A critical and formative use of generative machine learning tools, such as ChatGPT, is presented and explored with students. A large portion of the syllabus is taylored to the development of skills for the use and mastery of stable diffusion platforms (of generative artificial intelligence) in the domain of images.

José Bragança de Miranda: Corpo e Imagem, Lisboa, Vega, 2017, 3ed.  Nicholas Mirzoeff: "What is visual Culture?", Journal of Visual Culture.  Marquard Smith: 'Visual Culture Studies: History, Theory, Practice'  Walter Benjamin: "A obra de arte na época da sua reprodutibilidade técnica", Trad. João Barrento.  Giorgio Agamben: 'Aby Warburg e a ciência sem nome' antecedido de Menmosine de Warburg.  Marie-José Mondzain: "Iconic Space and the Rule of Lands" in Hypatia, Vol. 15, No. 4, Contemporary French Women Philosophers. (Autumn, 2000), pp. 58-76  Jonathan Crary: "Techniques of the Observer" in October, Vol. 45. (Summer, 1988), pp. 3-35. Paul Virilio: "The Vision Machine", Paris, Galillée Lev Manovich, 'Instagram Platform as a Medium'. Mitchell Schwarzer: 2Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media", MIT press.